CHINLE, ARIZONA – It’s common knowledge there are no jobs on the Navajo Nation. But to Delane Atcitty, that’s a bunch of bull.

“There are jobs at home,” declared Atcitty, a rangeland management consultant who spoke at last week’s Native American Farm and Ranch Training at Acoma Pueblo. “There’s always been a job at home.”

That job is ranching but most Navajos don’t really treat their ranches as a business, Atcitty said.

If the tribe and individual ranchers could just “connect the dots” a bit, Atcitty contends, the vast rangelands and tribal ranches of the Navajo Nation could be producing a good living for both individual cattlemen and the tribe.

Delane Atcitty

“We have everything we need right here,” Atcitty told the Times, “but we aren’t using it so it works together.”

At the moment, the Navajo Nation is crowded with tiny ranches competing for marginal grassland. There’s not much incentive to alternate pastures on the open range, Atcitty pointed out, because if you leave a pasture for the winter, someone else will drive his cattle onto it.

“It’s the tragedy of the commons,” he said.

So most people end up grazing as many cattle as they can over the summer and are left feeding hay in the winter. This is bad not only for the cattle and the rangeland, but for the rancher.

“People are choosing quantity over quality,” observed Atcitty, “when it actually almost cancels out. You can get almost as much for 50 good cows as you can for 100 bad cows, with a lot less work.”

Figuring the cow-cost

A lot of people, Atcitty noted, are not figuring out their cow-cost — the amount of money it takes to raise one calf to salable size.

“If you’re hauling water and feeding hay at $14 to $16 per bale,” Atcitty explained, “your cow-cost could be as high as $1,200 to $1,400. Then you turn around and sell it for $1,100. At that point, you may be living the ranch lifestyle, but you’re not a rancher.”

Diné small ranchers also tend to get too attached to their animals and keep them too long, Atcitty opined.

“I’ll be hanging out at the corral with someone, and they’ll say, ‘That’s Mabel. That one’s Gertie. We’re keeping Gertie around another year. Maybe she’ll have a calf.’

Cattlemen tend to be independent types, Atcitty noted, but the reality is that in a place like the Navajo Nation, where resources are few and widespread, small ranches are not viable unless they can collaborate. Groups like the 14R, a coalition of ranches in Nahata Dziil, make more sense.

“Let’s say you pack four or five cows in a trailer and drive 50 miles to Belen to sell them,” Atcitty postulated. “You’ve probably spent $120 on fuel, and if you brought along a helper or your family, that’s another $80 in food. You have to figure your time is money too.”

The alternative?

“Throw in with some other producers, rent a semi, and deliver 50 head,” he said.

Cooperatives can go in together for things like vaccines and dewormers, minimizing cost by buying in bulk.

This article was first published in the Navajo Times. All rights reserved.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas School of Law’s Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative is hosting two Emerson National Hunger Fellows from the Congressional Hunger Center in Washington, D.C.

The center selected the initiative as a host site due to its focus on tribal policy reform, including regional food policy discussions at tribal communities across the United States and development of a model food code for use by tribal governments. This will be the first time the center has placed fellows in Arkansas.

The Congressional Hunger Center works to make issues of hunger a priority to policymakers in the United States government and to raise a new generation of leaders to address issues of hunger and poverty. Its mission is to train and inspire leaders who work to end hunger and to bridge the gap between grassroots efforts and national and international public policy to provide access to nutritious, affordable and culturally appropriate food.

“We are honored and delighted to host the visiting Hunger Fellows from this nationally prestigious program,” said Janie Hipp, director of the initiative. “Hunger is persistent within tribal communities throughout the United States with over 25 percent of all Native peoples relying daily upon federal feeding programs to address the health impacts of hunger and food insecurity.”

In some communities, the prevalence of food insecurity can rise to well over 50 percent. The initiative seeks to turn the corner on this humanitarian crisis through strong tribal and federal policies, integrated self-determination and self-governance and a deeper understanding of the connections between policies, resources, actions and outcomes.

“The Fellows we are working with will help us and others to better understand this landscape,” Hipp said.

The 2018 visiting fellows are Sarah Goldman from West Hartford, Connecticut, and Corey Malone-Smolla from Richmond, Virginia.

Goldman is founder of the Heart of the Heartland Program, a five-week summer program for undergraduate students that combines hands-on practical training with a policy, biology and business management curriculum. While at the initiative, she will convene roundtable discussions that will foster important intertribal discussion and collaboration so that tribes may come together to address national food policy while meeting their community needs around food, agriculture and nutrition.

“I’m drawn to the organization’s mission and relentless work toward allowing tribal governments to be the active agents in food systems change in Indian Country,” Goldman said. “I hope that — through my time at IFAI — I am able to become a reliable facilitator, advocate and source of information as I conduct policy roundtable discussions.”

Malone-Smolla developed her passion for food access as Yale University’s director of food recovery, where she coordinated the daily collection of leftover food from Yale’s dining halls to be delivered to soup kitchens in the New Haven area. Her fellowship will support the Model Comprehensive Food and Agriculture Code Project, which will create a model legal code for food and agriculture, hunger, nutrition, health and economic development. This model, along with an implementation process, will be shared with all tribes within the U.S. to aid development of localized economic strategies and food policy interventions.

“I hope to learn from everyone at the initiative the best ways to collaborate with individuals and communities across movements and justice initiatives.” Malone-Smolla said. “I see my work as aligning with the initiative’s goal of increasing involvement in disciplines relating to food and agriculture. I know that this opportunity will affirm and direct my desire to work for food justice for all.”

About the Congressional Hunger Center: Established in 1993, the center’s mission is to train and inspire leaders who work to end hunger and advocate public policies that create a food secure world. The staff and fellows are committed to fulfilling the goal of the former House Select Committee on Hunger, “to find real solutions to hunger and poverty.” It administers the Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellows Program and the Mickey Leland International Hunger Fellows Program.

About the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative: The initiative enhances health and wellness in tribal communities by advancing healthy food systems, diversified economic development and cultural food traditions in Indian Country. The initiative empowers tribal governments, farmers, ranchers and food businesses by providing strategic planning and technical assistance; by creating new academic and professional education programs in food systems and agriculture; and by increasing student enrollment in land grant universities in food and agricultural related disciplines.

About University of Arkansas School of Law: The University of Arkansas School of Law prepares students for success through a challenging curriculum taught by nationally recognized faculty, unique service opportunities and a close-knit community that puts students first. With alumni in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, two territories and 20 countries, it has been ranked among the top 10 “Values in Legal Education” by the National Jurist magazine for four consecutive years and is among the top 42 public law schools, according to U.S. News and World Report.

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.

NAPLP is a full scholarship program for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian undergraduate and graduate students to study applied American politics at the George Washington University in Washington DC. As part of the Semester in Washington Politics program, NAPLP is funded by a generous gift from AT&T. The scholarship covers up to nine credits in tuition, on-campus housing, round-trip air travel, and a stipend for books and living expenses ($2,400 in two installments). Students also have the opportunity to have an internship in places such as a congressional office, national tribal organization or a federal agency and to develop lasting connections with a cohort of Native American students from across the country.

CIPP is the George Washington University-based center whose purpose is to research, educate, and promote public awareness on issues of significance to Indigenous communities. In the GW spirit of scholarship and service, we hope that students who participate in NAPLP return to their schools and communities with fresh perspectives, knowledge, and skills about the political process and community organizing and that they feel better prepared to give back to and take a leadership role in their communities.

In Alaskan nursing homes and hospitals, tight federal regulations have meant that the most comforting foods for natives have been labeled illegal. That’s slowly changing.

One afternoon in 2014, May Bernhardt, an 87-year-old Inupiat Eskimo with stringy gray hair, toothlessly chewed a banana. The fruit was perfectly ripe and a good source of fiber and potassium, but she hated it.

Bernhardt lives in a nursing home in the Alaskan Arctic, and like the other Inupiat elders in the home, she was accustomed to being served imported foods from faraway climes. But she and the others craved the traditional Inupiat foods they grew up eating. Most of them were raised in the bush of northwestern Alaska living a mostly subsistence lifestyle, eating caribou, fish, wild tundra berries, and marine mammals like seals and whales. Once they moved into the nursing home, a wooden building atop stilts drilled into permafrost beneath the grassy tundra, they had to eat what the home provided. And that meant bananas, green beans, potatoes, and pasta.

“You can’t get an old-timer Eskimo and just switch them over to white [people’s] food. Such a big change don’t agree with ’em,” Bernhardt complained. Richard, another elder sitting nearby, 66-years-old and gray at the temples, concurred with the assessment.

The problem is they didn’t have much say in the matter. Federal regulations determine which foods can be served in most nursing homes, and traditional Inupiat foods, the most unique of all Native American cuisines, sorely conflict with rules for nutrition and food safety. Since 2011, when the elders moved into the nursing home in the town of Kotzebue—with a population of 3,000, it’s Alaska’s largest town above the Arctic Circle—a distant federal bureaucracy thousands of miles away had come between them and the wild, meat- and animal fat–based diet they had grown up on.

They complained. And the staff at the nursing home listened and brought their concerns south—to dieticians in Anchorage, health care providers, and Alaskan politicians. Soon, they had sparked a battle between this far-flung nursing home and the federal government that would embroil this tiny Arctic town in a tangled web of nutrition politics.

* * *

When Val Kreil arrived in Kotzebue in 2013, he planned to stay for three weeks as the nursing home’s interim director. A soft-spoken middle-aged man, balding with a few tufts of red hair, Kreil had worked in more than 30 nursing homes throughout the “Lower 48,” as Alaskans call the continental U.S.

But Kotzebue charmed him immediately. He liked the home’s diverse staff from all over the country and world. Sure, the negative-40-degree winter days and ferocious winds were daunting, but the hardy locals amazed him with their good nature despite living in one of the Earth’s harshest climates.

Traditional Inupiat foods, the most unique of all Native American cuisines, sorely conflict with federal rules for nutrition and food safety.

More than anything, Kreil was impressed by how the Inupiat community showed respect toward its elders. In his vast experience, Kreil explained, “Kotzebue is the only place where I have seen elders truly respected. In the Lower 48, it’s more just lip service.” He admired the Inupiat tradition of young hunters always sharing their catch with elders, a sign of deference in a hunting-centered culture. So Kreil signed on as permanent director of the country’s northernmost accredited nursing home, known as Utuqqanaat-Inaat in Inupiaq.

And then he started to hear the complaints about the food—complaints that went deeper than the expected dissatisfaction from constant cafeteria food. The home had a strict meal schedule, as in other nursing homes, one designed to meet the nutritional goals determined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and enforced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, which determines reimbursements for all accredited, federally funded nursing homes like Kotzebue’s. Kreil knew his nursing home depended on federal reimbursement, and receiving that money required he serve only USDA-approved foods. He answered the elders’ supplications by blaming “the Lower 48—and the elders knew exactly what I meant.”

The only exception to the prohibition against traditional foods in the nursing home was during monthly “potlucks.” On the first Monday of each month, a long buffet table stretched across the nursing home’s dining hall with bubbling caribou soup, raw whale blubber, baked salmon and sheefish, wild berry desserts, and a bowl of seal oil—the quintessential Inupiat condiment and all-purpose dip. Steam would curl upward into the hall’s high, latticed ceilings as residents and their relatives, who provided the spread, feasted. (It could not be prepared in the nursing home’s kitchen or served using its plates or cutlery.) Potluck foods, legally considered “gifts” to the elders, were exempt from the official tallies of caloric intake that counted toward nutritional goals.

* * *

When Kreil moved to Kotzebue, he inherited the previous director’s effort to serve traditional foods more often. When he reached out to a USDA representative in the Lower 48 to discern where things stood, he was met with surprise—she was not accustomed to contact from above the Arctic Circle, where agriculture and livestock, the USDA’s focus, are virtually nonexistent. To be eligible for federal reimbursement dollars, wild game animals, she told him, would require the same pre- and postmortem inspection as domesticated animals. A pre-mortem inspection for wild caribou, moose, musk oxen, seals, and whales is, of course, impossible. (As Kreil put it, they’re “not going to just stand there for the USDA inspector to stare” at them.) And besides, selling wild game meat is illegal anyway, so receiving federal reimbursement for such food would be akin to its illegal purchase and therefore impossible.

Traditional Inupiat foods—and indeed all local foods in the Arctic—are necessarily wild. But USDA guidelines apply chiefly to domesticated produce. In addition, Inupiat dishes violate the USDA’s nutritional standards. The particular Arctic environment of northwestern Alaska shaped a unique native cuisine of wild foods high in meat and animal fat and virtually devoid of fruits and vegetables. High-fat foods like whale blubber and seal oil, though once essential for surviving Arctic winters, exceed recommendations for fat intake as taught by modern medical dogma. And serving such foods raw, a favorite Inupiat custom, is totally out of the question for federal standards. Despite its stunning natural bounty, as far as the USDA was concerned, northern Alaska is a food desert.

Kotzebue was not the only town in Alaska experiencing this fight, though. Kreil soon found an ally in Ted Mala, an internal medicine physician, who had been pushing for a rule change at his Anchorage hospital before Kreil’s arrival. Like nursing homes, federally funded hospitals and schools also receive reimbursement only by serving USDA-approved foods and meeting nutrition standards.

A tall hulking figure with a gentle voice, Mala had noticed his elderly patients frequently refusing hospital food but heartily eating traditional dishes brought in by relatives. He treated one native teenage girl with depression and suicidal thoughts who had been transferred to Anchorage from her remote village and, at first, refused to speak to psychiatrists. Once under Mala’s care at Anchorage’s native hospital, the flagship facility of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, she began eating traditional foods and opened up. “After a while they couldn’t get her to stop talking,” Mala said. “Imagine—a child flown out of her village against her will to the big city, locked up in a hospital and given tasteless food she wasn’t used to.” He still attributes her improvement to being in a place where “people were talking her own language and eating her own foods.”

Mala has numerous stories pointing to the important role traditional foods have played in his patients’ health, yet, he griped, “these foods practically had to be smuggled into the hospital like illicit contraband.” He especially recognized their value for patients suffering from mental health issues, a rampant epidemic among Alaska Native young adults.

In a region with few job opportunities but plentiful fish and game, serving wild foods could help the local economy.

Mala’s experience is anecdotal, but evidence is accumulating to support his conviction. The Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention began encouraging consumption of traditional foods in 2008 as a way to promote health and prevent obesity and diabetes among Native Americans. With the shift away from physically demanding subsistence lifestyles and toward foods mostly purchased in grocery stores, health problems that were once rare have become common among native peoples. Obesity rates in Alaska soared more than 60 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, accompanied by rising rates of obesity-related diseases like diabetes. The medical profession increasingly sees traditional foods as part of the solution.

Mala was raised in Buckland, a tiny road-less village that sits one hour by motorboat upriver from Kotzebue. (His father, Ray Mala, was Hollywood’s first native movie star.) After finishing medical school, Ted Mala became the first Alaskan Native physician to practice medicine in his home state. He has become a leading proponent of blending native traditions with modern conceptions of health.

In 2009, Mala began attending annual White House Tribal Nations Conferences where tribal representatives gathered to raise issues and engage with specific federal agencies. Each year he represented the Inupiat Eskimo and pushed the USDA about serving traditional foods to hospitalized patients. His argument rested on cultural and health grounds—more traditional foods would improve health and strengthen native culture—but also on economic ones. In a region with few job opportunities but plentiful fish and game, serving wild foods could help the local economy, he argued. Instead of spending federal money on shipping costly produce, all of which comes from further south, funds could instead support local hunters and fishermen to provide food to the town’s nursing home, hospital, and school.

But his annual argument yielded little progress. So, in 2011, Mala tried a different route: He approached Alaska’s Sen. Mark Begich to discuss legislative fixes. Begich was familiar with the issue—it was a topic of regular complaint from his constituents. After a rural outreach trip to Kotzebue in 2012, during which nursing home staff pressed him on it, he tasked his assistant Andrea Sanders with drafting legislation that he would present on the U.S. Senate floor.

Sanders, a native of Alaska’s Yukon River delta region, began researching the issue. In early 2013, she began drafting a bill that would allow traditional foods to be served in public facilities primarily serving native people while also encouraging increased consumption of traditional foods for health reasons. She borrowed wording from Alaska’s own state regulations on wild foods. With its frontier culture and strong tradition of living off the land, Alaska’s law was far more lenient than federal rules on the topic of traditional and wild foods. Mala wrote letters of support, providing both medical and cultural perspectives for politicians and federal agencies.

The following year, in early 2014, the U.S. Congress was busy tussling over the Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation setting federal policy for agriculture and food that is renewed every five years. Using the legislation Sanders had drafted, Begich pushed for a traditional foods amendment in the Senate while Alaska’s Don Young pushed similarly in the House of Representatives. There was plenty of debate over a Republican initiative to strip safety net legislation from the bill, but little disagreement over the traditional foods amendment. It was ultimately included in the final legislation, signed into law on Feb. 7, 2014. The amendment, titled “Service of Traditional Foods in Public Facilities,” was a major victory for Alaska and for natives throughout the country. In the words of Daniel Consenstein, a USDA representative in Anchorage, the 2014 Farm Bill was “the first time that the U.S. Congress officially recognized that the traditional foods of Native Americans are a real part of the American food system. And an important part.”

* * *

On a drizzly day in July 2015, more than a year after the passage of the updated Farm Bill, a crowd gathered around a small trailer in Kotzebue for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. A leading member of the Inupiat community spoke as raindrops splotched his notes; miles away across the tundra, rain quenched wildfires that had filled the town with smoke in recent days. The speaker stood before a row of Inupiat elders sitting in wheelchairs, themselves surrounded by dozens of locals who had come out in support. Mala stood among the crowd and received a special mention in the brief speech.

The ribbon was cut to inaugurate the Siglauq Center, Alaska’s first official processing center for native foods. The trailer, a repurposed woodworking shop, would provide space and tools to process wild game and fish served in Kotzebue’s nursing home. The crowd toured the trailer, admiring its gleaming steel counters topped with saws and grinders and its two large walk-in freezers for storage.

By summer 2016 Inupiat foods were officially on the menu in Kotzebue’s nursing home—prepared in its kitchen, served on its plates.

The construction of the Siglauq Center helped the nursing home clear the remaining legal hurdles posed by USDA regulation by providing a sanctioned place to process the food. After the approval of the Farm Bill, Kreil had called the USDA administrator once again to discuss the “Exotic Animals” provision of the Farm Bill. The provision lists common game species requiring proper USDA inspection, including deer, elk, and bison, but says nothing about two deer family members most relevant to northwestern Alaska—caribou and moose. The USDA administrator, admitting that since moose and caribou were not mentioned in the provision they may not require USDA oversight after all, agreed to defer to Alaska’s state agencies for approving these wild game meats.

Kreil had also triumphed by gaining approval from CMS for his new menu. On a conference call that included representatives of Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation and federal representatives of CMS, Kreil argued that a CMS memo released in September 2011 allowed nursing homes to serve produce from their own gardens. In the Arctic, Kreil argued, “the tundra is our garden,” and so its wild bounty was the equivalent of garden vegetables in the Lower 48. DEC granted Siglauq a permit, and CMS agreed to maintain federal reimbursements for the wild foods processed there.

By summer 2016 Inupiat foods were officially on the menu in Kotzebue’s nursing home—prepared in its kitchen, served on its plates, and counted toward the nutritional goals of its residents. Cyrus Harris, a local Inupiat man, worked as the nursing home’s official hunter and fisherman, perhaps the only job description of its kind in the country. Harris grew up along the shores and rivers of northwestern Alaska and cherishes the job that allows him to continue traditional subsistence activities and to serve his respected elders.

* * *

Despite the achievements already won, the battle over traditional foods continues. One food not yet included or approved in the Farm Bill is seal oil. A Seal Oil Task Force formed in late 2016 with Kreil and a team of dieticians pushing for its inclusion among permitted traditional foods. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are currently analyzing seal oil samples for botulism, a potential danger of improper production and a primary concern of health agencies. If safe production can be ensured, Alaska’s DEC will allow it to join the menu.

During a recent lunch at Kotzebue’s nursing home, Bernhardt sat at one of the tables, slurping loudly at a bowl of caribou soup. Behind her, against the dining room wall, stood a large glass case displaying traditional Inupiat clothing and hunting implements—clothing that she grew up wearing that is now confined to display. Her generation may be the last to have truly grown up in the Arctic wild, and the threat posed by rising sea levels to Alaska’s coastal villages may speed the already hastened demise of Inupiat culture.

But on that day, her complaint was simpler: She thought her own caribou soup recipe was better.

In this funding cycle USDA anticipates awarding approximately $5 million in grant funding to support efforts that improve access to local foods in schools. Grant funds will be made available on a competitive basis, subject to availability of federal funds. Applicants may apply for a Planning grant, Implementation grant, or Training grant. Planning grant awards will range from $20,000-$50,000 and implementation grant awards will from $50,000-$100,000. Funding for training grants is expected to range from $20,000-$50,000. For all three types of grants, the federal share of a project cannot exceed 75 percent of the total cost of the project, as required by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. Therefore, the applicant must provide at least 25 percent of the costs of the total project. The total project cost is the federal grant request amount plus the applicant match.

Science Post Graduate Scholarship Fund (STEM Loan for Service) is a graduate level educational loan awarded to enrolled members of a federally recognized American Indian tribe or Alaska Native group OR provide documentation of ancestry to possession of one-fourth degree Indian blood of a federally recognized tribe pursuing graduate or professional level education. To be considered, applicants must possess a minimum 3.0 GPA and be pursuing a master, doctorate or professional degree in the STEM fields. Must be (or will be) pursuing a master’s or doctorate degree as a full-time degree-seeking student at an accredited graduate school in the United States. Exclusive consideration is paid to degree candidates in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields (may include: Medical and Life Sciences; Engineering and Physical Sciences; Mathematics and Computational Sciences, Earth, Environmental and Agriculture Sciences; and Technology) to be verified through the submission of current transcripts or proof of acceptance to an eligible program;

The specific purpose of the Science Post Graduate Scholarship Fund (SPGSF) program is to provide financial assistance to eligible American Indian and Alaska Native graduate and professional degree candidates to promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) research in and opportunities for careers with Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) and BIE funded organizations on and off reservation and tribal governments. Future employment with other federal and state agencies and private entities may be eligible if the organization’s primary mission is assistance and support to tribal communities or individuals.

Advanced education is the STEM fields is in greater demand than ever before, particularly in Indian communities. Many tribal lands are situated on lands with greater natural resources potential that requirement individuals with education, skills and expertise to sustainably develop resources. Indian students in STEM fields often recognize the importance of reinvesting their knowledge back into their home communities, bringing skills back to home tribes or other tribal communities. There is a high deficiency in STEMfields and urgency for research to understand why. A portion of the SPGSF will be directed towards graduate level (Masters and Doctoral) research to understand the barriers that discourage Indian students participation in these fields and expanding STEM opportunities at Tribal Colleges and Universities.

The SPGSF is a loan for service program to be served on a 1 per 1 basis, i.e., one year of funding per one year of service. The maximum amount of an award will be up to $30,000 per year. Actual award amounts and the number of awards will be determined based on the number of funded students at each academic level (master’s, professional and doctoral).

All applicants for the STEM Loan for Service must be in good academic standing. Please upload your most recent transcript verifying your academic eligibility for this program.

The AIGC STEM Loan for Service opportunity is primarily intended for individuals with a willingness and ability to accept employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, other federal agencies/positions primarily serving American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities, state or local government agencies/positions primarily serving AI/AN communities or tribal governments. Secondarily, AIGC STEM Loan for Service recipients MAY be approved for employment in non-government organizations (NGO), Community Based Organizations (CBO) or other organizations where the STEM Loan for Service Fellow will work primarily with or within American Indian Communities. The BIE Office of Higher Education holds the sole responsibility for approval of all aforementioned positions which must begin within six (6) months of graduation; therefore, it is imperative that recipients understand that they should seek a variety of positions prior to completing their graduate program. Most BIE position openings can be reviewed at www.usajobs.com. Selecting the “I agree” box below indicates to AIGC and the BIE that applicants and eventual recipients of the AIGC STEM Loan for Service agree to seek and accept employment in the primary foci areas of this award. Please note that in some cases it may require that a recipient RELOCATE to obtain suitable employment for this service related payback.

In 500 words or less, please describe how your selected STEM major will apply to the intent of the STEM Loan for Service program (see previous question) as it applies to our personal committment to serve the American Indian and Alaska Native community.

Please list up to four (4) community engagement opportunities in which you have recently engaged

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Program Plan: If you have a Program Plan (a map of coursework by terms toward degree/diploma completion), please upload it here. This will help program staff to determine your persistence and academic success for future funding.

Please tell us how you heard about the American Indian Graduate Center and our opportunities. This information will help to inform us in future outreach activities.